I read all kinds of books (one of my friends jokes that I will read anything that holds still long enough), but sci fi/fantasy is my favorite. I also love books on anthropology and archaeology and other sciences.

I really liked the idea of looking at the story of Beauty and the Beast from a male perspective. I always have thought of the story as more of the transformation of a man from an unkind human being to one who understands and appreciates the world around him, especially with iterations such as the Disney version.

The fact that some of the traditional stories were utilized in this retelling was a great homage to the original iterations of the tale. The ways of modernizing the tale by using issues such as bad home lives to me makes it a better story than the original because our heroine has more of a happily ever after situation than women in the original tales, who more often than not had great home lives with loving fathers. To me, this made the story more powerful.

The fact that the protagonist was able to connect to other fairy tale characters through a chat room was also pretty cool. I like thinking that, as these stories occur in a generally ambiguous setting, it's possible that they occur within the same fantastical setting.